GUEST: It's been mine for about 30 years, and it was given to me by my father. And he purchased it in 1963 from the local auction house. This is one of a pair that was in the Winter Palace in Peking. The other one, we have no idea what has happened to it.
APPRAISER: This is called an elephant vase, and that's because of the elephant handles. You often find this shape in very regal, impressive kind of locations, so it's natural that it could have been in the palace. It's unusual to see it in lacquer. Lacquer is from the sap of a tree, and the different layers are applied thinly, one on top of the other, and it takes about two to three days for each layer to dry. So for a vase like this, there probably are literally hundreds of layers of lacquer. So the time it took to construct this would have been considerable. One of the first things that struck my eye is the lappets, which are these shaped forms descending from the neck.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: And the lotus decoration is deeply cut, but not terribly finely cut. That, and the lack of presence of, of a mark on the base, doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't in the palace. But it does probably indicate that this was not an 18th-century vase, but rather something created in the late 19th century, about 1880, made for the palace, and still a fine-quality object. The problem with this vase is the condition.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: The deer antlers here are missing.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: And I'm going to spin it around. And there's some quite severe damage running right through here, through the skyline. And right here, somebody has put in plastic wood or something.
GUEST: Yes, I just...
APPRAISER: To try to make a repair, and it's very clumsily done.
GUEST: It was done before '63. And the sales slip does say that it had been repaired.
APPRAISER: And in 1963, it was-- $500 was the cost, right?
GUEST: Yes, yes.
APPRAISER: Okay, now, up until fairly recently, something like this with damage as extensive as this is, and dating from a late period, would not have been worth very much money. But what's happened is, the Chinese market has grown. So this has some, some value. If this came up at an auction sale today, even with the damage, we would expect to get somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000 for it.
GUEST: I see, thank you.
APPRAISER: Had it not been damaged, I think that it actually would have been in that sort of $50,000- $70,000 kind of range.
GUEST: Yes.
